Oh Me Oh Maia: Now On Greenlight

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Questioning crowds about their commitment to Maia caused one of the most tense Kickstarters ever. It eventually cleared the goal with room to spare, but for a time the future was not so certain for the space colony management simulator. With the game on firmer footing, and the alpha in the hands of backers, developer Simon Roth has taken the next and inevitable step of dropping it on Steam Greenlight and hoping for a positive community reaction. He’s even rustled up a new trailer for the very purpose. Let’s look.
It’s a foreboding mix of sci-fi simulator and god game, with a simulation so complex that the usually stoic Adam gasped at it. The larger scope of the game isn’t really covered in this trailer, instead it takes a few minutes to show off the atmospheric and hellish planet of Maia, the brain-mangling first-person view, and a few segments where the building tools are on display. This is from very early alpha, 0.29.

There are other videos on his channel to help you make up your mind, and Roth has marked the next video as a favourite on Youtube. I wouldn’t imagine it’s how he’d demonstrate his game, but it does show it running, a few of the selection mechanics, and the changeable awfulness of the weather systems.

This would get my vote too, but then i worry about Boris Johnson being PM and then i despair too deeply to finish senten….

As for Maia, been watching ever since lewie mentioned it and the twitter account started, rly looking forward to it, can’t get enough of these sort of god games, now all i need is a sequel to startopia and i’ll be set for the next decade. :P

Oh yes he is indeed very intelligent, i don’t like the act tho, a lot of people think he can do no harm, but he’s still a tory so….
/offtopic over
sorry shouldn’t have mentioned politics, MAIAMAIAMAIAMAIAMAIA …. there that’s better, can’t wait until i can start butterfly effects to doom my fort…. colony? rockhome? underbungalow? what are we calling the bases? :P must be punny….

Am I the only one slightly frustrated by the trailers for this game? I love this type of game, I adore the aesthetics of this game, and the music design makes me incredibly happy… but I always come away from the trailers a little worried about the actual game play.

Still, it is just alpha I suppose. I really do look forward to being proven wrong on this one!

I backed the project and I follow its progress from afar. It seems that a lot of the ‘fun’ gameplay is not yet there and that Simon Roth is mostly busy on the simulation/engine front.
I don’t think it is very worrying, that corresponds to how all development projects go, that is indeed down to the alpha-ness of the thing, and the simulation heavy aspect of the game.

Well, the video reminds me a lot of Dungeon Keeper, I take it as a very good sign.
The end result could be very disappointing indeed if the simulation aspect makes Simon Roth forget about the gameplay. I hope that it won’t be the case but it is true that it is a risk.
I followed Introversion’s blog for some time and it seems that they really took the simulation thing to the extremes. They built a very cool technology and had a lot of fun while doing so but it sounds like they really had no idea what kind of gameplay they wanted to implement.
As long as Maia keeps that in mind, I think that it can avoid this pitfall.
and if Simon Roth starts implementing realistic blood vessels to better simulate injuries, it might be start to ask him to stop (or to go even farther and create a flawed but magnificent game ^^).